Gr1Innovations

Teaching you how to make money online since 1999

5 Proven Tips for Blogging Success

These days blogs are everywhere. Most businesses have them, many people have at least one, and lots of trusted news outlets deliver their content through them. If you search for just about anything online you are likely to come across at least one blog. And the number of blogs on the internet is growing exponentially each year.

With that in mind, there are a few things you should do if you are thinking about starting a blog, or if you already have one, and you want it to be successful. You can’t just throw one up and expect readers, rankings, and money to come pouring in. It takes a lot to time and effort to become a successful blogger.

Here are some proven tips that almost all blogging professionals followed to become successful…

1) Valuable content is always king. High quality, original, useful content should be the base of any blog. Your readers need to find lots of value in your content or they won’t keep coming back to read it. If your blog focuses on news of some sort, be sure you are providing up to date information. If your blog sets out to teach the user something, be sure to teach in a clear, concise and practical way. If your content is not engaging then nothing else you do with your blog will matter.

2) Don’t hide. If you are the only person posting content to the blog, you should put a picture of yourself along with a short bio on the sidebar, and link it to the “about” page where you go into more detail about you and your blog. If the blog has multiple authors, give each of them a page on where they add information about themselves. Readers want to feel connected with the person(s) providing the content on a blog, so show them you are real and can relate to them.

3) Encourage interaction. Try getting people to post comments as much as possible. You want your readers to feel like they are able to interact with you and network with other readers. By allowing, and encouraging comments, you are creating a sense of community and belonging. If your readers feel like they are a part of the site, they will keep coming back.

4) Make it Fun. Find ways to keep your readers entertained and coming back other than just to read. Make use of polls, games, social media, pictures, videos, and so on. Your writing is important but it’s always good to spice things up a bit too.

5) Frequent Updates. Although not quite as important as quality, the quantity of content on a blog is still very important. People want to see new posts quite often. Try to set a schedule for regular updates and stick to it. If you need to write a bunch of posts in one day and schedule them out to post automatically later on, then go ahead and do that. Just make sure your blog is being updated frequently. Subscribers and regular readers will begin to lose interest if you don’t give them a reason to keep coming back.

There’s no doubt that it takes a lot of hard work to build a successful blog, but in the end, it’s more than worth it. Follow the tips above and you will be well on your way!

Up and Comers vs Established Bloggers

When you are starting out with a new blog, you might look up to other bloggers in your niche for inspiration and ideas about how you can reach those levels of success for yourself.

It makes perfect sense of course, you want to be as successful as they are, right? But you might just find that emulating them isn’t quite enough. Here’s why…

* Success breeds success

It is a shame but often very good blog posts will be largely ignored when they are published on small lesser known blogs, whilst posts that aren’t as good that are published by established bloggers will receive much more acclaim.

The fact is that a successful blog instantly has more credibility than a new one, sometimes almost regardless of quality. In the online world, first mover advantage is alive and well and if you are just starting out you probably don’t have it.

* How can you become established and credible?

Well firstly, you need to find your own angle. It is easy to think that if you can write as well as another blogger you can be just as successful. This isn’t true most of the time.

You need to either be better, or different. Ask yourself the question “why would people read my blog instead of theirs?” If you try to emulate a successful blog, you might find you can’t answer this question.

* Up and coming blogs

A really helpful way to find your own voice is to look at the up and coming blogs in your niche. These are the guys that are doing exactly what you want to do – they are gaining popularity and becoming established.

Each of these up and comers have one thing in common; they have found a way to differentiate their blogs (even if they don’t realize it).

Again, just copying them isn’t enough, but try comparing them to the big guys and try to figure out what their unique selling point is, what angle have they used to set themselves apart and how are they promoting themselves?

You can build up a very successful blog and become a professional blogger, but it will take a lot of time and hard work. You aren’t going to do it by copying others, you must find a way to be unique while still following the overall success recipe of the top blogs in your niche.

This guest post was brought to you by Alex from ToMakeALiving.com – A site dedicated to showing you how to earn money online.

7 Powerful WordPress Plugins to Turbocharge Your Blogs Performance

A key factor in both visitor satisfaction and keeping the search engines happy right now is making sure that your blog loads quickly. There should be no errors, no waiting – just click and boom the content is ready for your visitors.

If, for whatever reason, your blog is running slowly then it can affect your online business in a number of ways. Firstly people aren’t willing to wait around for pages to load anymore.

They used to say you had 30 seconds to grab a visitors attention and in the days of dial-up internet access that was true but today a guesstimate is that you have at most 10 seconds before the surfer hits the back button and goes looking somewhere else for what they want.

Secondly if your blog is loading slowly it can directly affect your search engine rankings. Slower sites don’t do as well in the search engine results pages (SERPS).

So it’s important that your WordPress blog is hosted with a reliable company that have no real latency issues but it’s equally important that you optimize your WordPress blog with plugins that help reduce the page load time as much as possible.

Before you get carried away just make sure that you test the actual speed of your blog first – you might not need to make any changes. You can run a speed test here -> http://www.iwebtool.com/speed_test

Then if you decide you want to optimize your WordPress blog speed here are 7 of the very best plugins you can use to help achieve this goal:

1. WP Smush.It – This plugin automatically reduces the size of image files on the fly so they will load more quickly. Very neat and very effective.

2. WP HTTP Compression – By outputting your pages in zip format to a compatible browser the WP HTTP Compression plugin can reduce your page size by up to 80% as well as increasing your download speeds by up to 4 times. It shouldn’t be used in conjunction with WP Super Cache however.

3. Hyper Cache – If your blog is hosted by a provider without a whole pile of cutting edge resources then this plugin is ideal for you. It’s very easy to configure and is automatically optimized to reduce disk usage for your blog.

4. WP Optimize – This is a very simple but very effect database clean up tool and allows you to run database maintenance without using PhpMyAdmin as well as clearing out your spam or comment queue with a couple of clicks.

5. WP Super Cache – This very neat plug created HTML files from your WordPress blog data and serves those instead. This reduces the overhead on the server dishing out the files because the SQL database for your WordPress install isn’t constantly involved or being queried. A very neat solution but check its compatibility with other plugins or themes you might be using.

6. WP Minify – This plugin helps you compress JavaScript and CSS files to make sure that pages load more quickly. Most theme developers don’t take the time to optimize their CSS so this plugin can really help with that problem and speed up your blog loading time as a result.

7. Hosting Monitor Plugin – This cool plugin allows you to check host up-time, hardware info, load average and the current users. Basically it allows you to keep tabs on your web host to make sure they are not the cause of your blog suffering from any speed problems. It’s one thing for a web host to claim 99.9% up-time… But it’s another thing to actually do it.

Hopefully you’ll find at least some of these plugins useful for when you’re doing your best to optimize your WordPress blog. Remember that the overall visitor experience is critical to you achieving the kind of massive and loyal online audience that you want.

Don’t let the fans down eh?

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Gr1innovations.com launched way back in 1999 and was one of the first sites of its kind. Then, when the internet really became mainstream a few years later, it gained fame as the #1 ranked make money online blog in the world.